It was Thursday morning in Sydney, Australia, when Mary-Louise McLaws got a call from yet another journalist who wanted to hear about that time she measured how often university students touched their faces during class.
The University of New South Wales professor is an expert on infectious diseases, and her 2015 study of face-touching is now being cited by news outlets reporting on the coronavirus all over the world. As an adviser to the World Health Organization, she’s been up late talking about something that has concerned anxious people everywhere as they seek ways to stop the spread of the deadly disease.
McLaws’s research showed that a human habit we hardly ever thought about before this week is surprisingly ubiquitous: face-touching.
The World Health Organization has asked people to stop. They can’t. Even as they stood at podiums in front of cameras this week to instruct people to restrain themselves from the habit, officials repeatedly brought their hands to their eyes, noses, and mouths — three main points of entry for dangerous pathogens.
President Trump — famously a germophobe — said he had stopped touching his face (but “I miss it,” he said). People online have shared tips: Use tissues, keep your hands busy with other activities. Members of Dartmouth College’s political-science department agreed to shame one another if they caught their colleagues in the act.
But even McLaws, the global expert on face-touching, says it’s nearly impossible to stop. She was shocked five years ago when, for research that was later published in the American Journal of Infection Control, she counted up the number of times 26 University of New South Wales students touched their faces over four hours. She witnessed more than 2,300 face-touches and calculated that each student did it about 23 times an hour. More unnervingly, the students touched their eyes, noses, or mouths about 10 times an hour.
“It’s quite frightening,” she said.
Despite her alarm, McLaws sounded cheery on the phone and said she was glad that her research had drawn widespread attention. When The Chronicle told her that her study had been cited in both The New York Times and The Washington Post, she was delighted.
“That’s so sweet of them,” she said.
It’s common for people to fixate on something like face-touching in times like these, she said, because they are looking for a way to control a scary situation. They may not be able to stop the virus from contaminating a nearby doorknob or elevator button, but they can block it from going any further.
As colleges and universities have struggled to devise policies to respond to the quickly evolving situation, here are links to The Chronicle’s key coverage of how this worldwide health crisis is affecting campuses.
Or so they think. McLaws’s research has shown that even health-care professionals, who know the risk of touching their faces, do it frequently. She first became curious about face-touching during the SARS epidemic, in 2003. Health-care workers, who cover their whole bodies in protective gear, were still contracting the disease at a SARS-designated hospital in Hong Kong, and McLaws was asked to find out why. She concluded that the workers were infecting themselves when they adjusted their face masks.
About a decade later McLaws advised the Australian government on its guidelines for protecting health-care workers from the spread of influenza. She studied the size of influenza particles, how far they can move, and the effectiveness of different masks against them. She also remembered that health-care workers touch their faces even while treating patients, so she wondered how often they do it when they’re out in the community.
McLaws needed a group of stationary people whom she could watch in their natural environment. She and her graduate students didn’t have to go far. By filming medical-school students during several lectures at their university, they were able to count the number of times students touched their faces and where on their faces their hands made contact.
Though she conducted the study with the flu in mind, McLaws said, coronavirus particles also spread by moving from a surface to a hand and then traveling up a nose or into a salivary gland. The particles can survive in the wild for many hours under the right conditions.
“Those particles,” she said, “have a good opportunity of staying alive and being a menace.”
Wiping out face-touching may not be realistic, McLaws said. But she hopes that if people know the habit isn’t as innocuous as it seems, they will at least try to restrain themselves when their hands are dirty. Washing hands is an essential defense, she said.
“If you really are a nose-scratcher or a cheek-scratcher or an eye-fiddler,” she said, “you can now do it confident that you’re not introducing pathogens.”
